Science Fiction

Ann Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice was a huge breakout novel that vanquished all comers during awards season. It racked up wins from Locus, the BSFA, the Arthur C. Clarke, Nebula, and Hugo Awards. As you might imagine, the recently published sequel, Ancillary Sword, was eagerly awaited. I enjoyed the first book despite some reservations, so I was really hoping this one would shore up some of the lacking elements of its predecessor. What I got was completely unexpected.

This is a really odd novel. It picks up where the first book left off, with Breq accepting a commission as an officer in Anaander Mianaai’s fleet and leading an expedition to… a space station with some minor strategic importance. There she butts heads with the local forces, led by one Captain Hetnys, and otherwise gets embroiled with various bits of local politics.

Like it’s predecessor, this book is somewhat lacking in plot, though I will say that it does become somewhat tighter as a result. Unlike it’s predecessor, many of the interesting things about the first book have been jettisoned. The complex non-linear narrative is gone. The first book’s heady mix of hard and soft SF has shifted much more to the soft SF side. Many of the most intriguing things about the first book, particularly the ambitious exploration of hive minds and what that means for identity, while present, aren’t really expanded upon in any real way. When Anaander Mianaai’s condition is revealed in the first book, it opened up many tantalizing opportunities… that are almost completely bypassed in this sequel. The mysterious alien presence of the Presger was hinted at in the first book, and while the Presger’s ambassador plays a significant role in this book, we still don’t really get much in the way of information on the Presger. Even some of the softer ideas, like the way Radch culture doesn’t distinguish between the sexes, calling everyone by female pronouns, aren’t really expanded on at all. I suppose we get some closer looks at Radch society, but little beyond what we already knew.

It’s a decidedly low-key approach that is not entirely unwelcome, but which makes me wonder where Leckie is trying to go with this series. It started off as a series filled with interesting ideas and an epic scope, and yet, it’s all shaken down to this rather simple story that doesn’t seem to really advance the series all that much. I suppose the implication is that the events of this book are happening all over the Radchaai Empire, which would make sense. And it’s not really bad per say, it’s just unexpected. Conceptually, I think this is something that could have worked really well, lots of crunchy ideas on a smaller, close-up scale. Alas, all of the interesting ideas originate in the first book and aren’t expanded upon very much in this sequel.

The book has a more episodic approach than its predecessor, and many of the individual episodes are quite good. The opening reveals Breq to be a capable leader who immediately recognizes the deception of one of her officers. There’s a great sequence where a pissed off Breq goes to the armory for target practice. Since she is a thousand of years old AI, she’s pretty good at it, leading to some slackjawed crew members (Seivarden memorably notes: “Fleet Captain is pretty fucking badass.”) Some of the incidents at the space station are less successful, though there are plenty of interesting bits about the formality of Radch society. There’s a decent enough courtroom drama at one point, and several other interesting tidbits here or there. Leckie’s not particularly great at action, but there’s not a ton of action here anyway and she gets the job done. Many of the new side characters are pretty fantastic. Alas, when you add it all up, it’s merely the sum of its parts, nothing more.

So I have mixed feelings about this. There are many bits to like, and I will say that it seems to be aging well in my head, but I don’t think it’s quite the equal of its predecessor either. It’s almost certainly going to appear on the Hugo ballot next year, but I’m doubting that it will win. One other side note: I listened to this on audio book, and I hated the reader. She was fine most of the time, but for certain characters, particularly the ones we’re not supposed to like, she puts on this ridiculous, high pitched, exaggerated cockney accent (I think). That wouldn’t be a disaster if she didn’t use the exact same voice for multiple characters, and if the story weren’t so talky (which it really is, and it gets kinda weird when Breq is speaking with two of the weirdly accented people). Just a fair warning, you’d probably be better off reading this one rather than listening.

I read a fair amount, but there are only a few authors whose output I eagerly await. Longtime readers already know that Neal Stephenson and Lois McMaster Bujold are the ringleaders, but John Scalzi is also among their ranks. Scalzi rankles a fair amount of folks because of his politics (which have been getting more and more pronounced over time), but in general, I’ve found his novels to be enjoyable pageturners. Being “easy to read” also rankles a certain element of fandom, those who seek “literary” status as opposed to entertainment and good old fashioned storytelling. Scalzi won a Best Novel Hugo award last year for Redshirts, which produced much teeth-gnashing from a wide range of people. It was an odd novel, but it’s one that seems to have aged well in my head (my only issues with it were meta-issues). I suspect I would not have ranked it #1 that year, but like this year’s Ancillary Justice win, I can’t really fault people from voting for what they like – the Hugo is a populist award, after all. So it’s with this baggage that I come to Scalzi’s latest novel, Lock In. In short, I found it disappointing. Not bad, per say, but I have trouble mustering up much enthusiasm.

Lock In takes place in the near future, after a global pandemic of something called Haden’s Syndrome that mostly presented flu-like symptoms, but for about 1% of the population, resulted in locked-in syndrome. This is a real condition that is thankfully pretty rare, but in the world of the novel, the amount of locked-in patients (called “Hadens” in the book) exploded. The world adapted and developed a whole suite of solutions, including a Haden-only virtual reality space, embedded neural networks, and robot-like machines that can be “driven” by Hadens. This is all worldbuilding though, and the story proper is a pretty straightforward police procedural, following FBI agents Chris Shane (a Haden himself) and Leslie Vann as the investigate a Haden-related death.

Science Fiction is perhaps infamous for its reliance on exposition and info-dumps, but the first chapter of this book is a pretty egregious example. It baldly lays out the worldbuilding, encyclopedia-style, and as near as I can tell, it’s completely superfluous. You get a lot of the same information through context as the story unfolds. I may be griping a little too hard about this, but it started me off on the wrong foot, and it took a while to recover.

While I’m complaining about things, Scalzi’s politics are showing. Of course, an author’s politics are always showing in one way or another, and Scalzi’s past novels were no exception, but this time around there are completely unnecessary tangents on things like, for example, gun control. These are disappointing tidbits, but fortunately, they aren’t pervasive. On the other hand, Scalzi’s concern with gender is much more successful. Agent Vann is great, a smart, tough, hard-drinking veteran agent who reminded me of the well connected smuggler at the heart of Polar City Blues (another SF mystery that, alas, I wound up enjoying more than Lock In). If you are paying attention, (and if you read Scalzi’s blog, how could you not pay attention to this stuff?) you’ll notice that Chris Shane’s gender is not specified. This apparently blew some people’s minds, but I was expecting this sort of thing from Scalzi. Of course, it’s pretty easy to pull off when your character is represented by a featureless robot 99.9% of the time in the novel, which did make me wonder much more about the lives of Hadens. Again, this is a detective thriller, so there’s not a lot of time given to exploring these aspects of a Haden’s life, but as tangents go, that would have been a welcome one.

The overall mystery is well done, but nothing particularly special. There aren’t any grand revelations, but it’s more satisfying than your typical episode of [insert CBS procedural here]. It took me longer than usual to be hooked (perhaps because of that clunky opening chapter), and while Scalzi normally excels at snappy dialogue, it wasn’t quite as snappy as his other recent efforts.

I ultimately did enjoy the book, but I found myself nitpicking, which I generally attribute to some deeper dislike (though I’m having trouble pinpointing that). It has been getting pretty good reviews though, so I’m fully expecting that it will be nominated for a Hugo next year (it will not, however, be appearing on my nominating ballot). Apparently Lock In was also optioned for a television show, and a SF police procedural might actually work really well. So I wasn’t totally on board with this book, but regardless, I’m very much looking forward to the second Human Division novel (er, collection?), as I really loved the first installment (even if it ended on an unexpected cliffhanger).

Since we’ve come dangerously close to decorative gourd season, motherfuckers, I figure I should knock out a few reviews before the Six Weeks of Halloween horror movie marathon begins in earnest. There’s going to be some overlap here with the most recent book queue, but a few other books I’ve read recently as well.

• Afterparty by Daryl Gregory – I bought this one blind, based solely on a quick recommendation by my friend Chandra. I wish I’d looked at the blurb though, as this book has my deck stacked against it. I really don’t like stories that center around drug use. There are a few that have worked, but more often than not, I find myself frustrated and annoyed. There are some interesting bits here, and in theory, it could have worked for me, but it never really connected. In the future, there’s been a smart drug revolution, with people able to quickly and easily design new drugs and print them out on a “chemjet”. When a new drug called Numinous starts making the rounds, Lyda Rose recognizes it as something she worked on earlier in her career and tries to find out who is making this stuff again. The drug provides a sort of spiritual euphoria, but those who take too much start to hallucinate their own personal guardian angel (or similar figure from your chosen belief system) and that hallucination never goes away. Alas, the SFnal elements are basically window dressing, an excuse to whine about religion or wallow in self-pity and guilt. The world isn’t quite a dystopia, I guess, but we only really see the worst elements of it. This would not be a fatal issue, except that I really couldn’t stand Lyda as a protagonist. She’s clearly had a rough go at it, so I can see where she’s coming from, I just didn’t find her methods particularly effective or worth following in this much detail. If it weren’t for her paranoid friend Ollie, perhaps the only competent character in the book (despite the continual reminder that her paranoia often gets the better of her), this book would have really been miserable. It does get better as it goes on and the ending works well enough, but it’s not really my thing and I found the whole thing rather depressing…
• A Darkling Sea by James Cambias – This story takes place at the bottom of a deep, ice-covered ocean on the planet Ilmatar. A human research party is there to observe the natives – blind lobster-like creatures that congregate around deep sea vents for sustenance and use sonar for navigation. However, the humans are prohibited from actually contacting the Ilmatarans by a peace treaty with a third race, the Sholen, who want to limit humanity’s expansion into the galaxy. When an unfortunate accident results in a human death, the Sholen kick up some diplomatic fuss in order to get the humans to leave, eventually resorting to force… and the Ilmatarans are caught in the middle. I enjoyed this novel greatly. Cambias has created a well balanced set of conflicts here, with sympathy extending to nearly all players. The Sholen, while clearly antagonistic, are not mere carboard cutouts. They have their own motivations and biases that would be amusing if the situation here wasn’t so dire. The Ilmatarans’ society is logically thought out given their environment, and their motivations are well established. You could argue that both alien races are a little too human-like in their thinking, but I think they cleared the bar on that (they aren’t the Tines or Primes, but they’re decent). Thematically, the book covers some interesting ground without ever feeling particularly preachy or manipulative. For instance, the whole thing is pretty thorough takedown of the rather silly Star Trek conceit of the “Prime Directive” (which basically forbids Starfleet personnel from interacting with developing alien races), but that emerges naturally from the story, rather than as a lecture. Overall, this is one of my favorite SF books of the year so far, and is an early possibility for a Hugo nomination next year.
• Grave Peril by Jim Butcher – The third book in the Dresden Files and while it’s an improvement over the second installment (which I did not particularly enjoy), it’s still not quite the fun modern fantasy adventure I keep thinking it will deliver. I have this sneaking suspicion that I’ll probably come back to this series again at some point when I’m looking for something kinda trashy, and I’ve heard the series gets better as it goes on… This installment covers how Harry deals with a particular uprising of ghosts and spirits, as well as a sneaky Vampire power grab. There’s plenty to like here, and there are a bunch of memorable episodes, but then a lot of this falls a bit flat. The primary side characters include Harry’s continually damseled girlfriend Susan and his sorta partner in crime, Michael. I feel like both of them kinda came out of nowhere, though it’s been a while, so maybe they made brief appearances earlier in the series (I’m pretty sure Susand did, actually). Murphy seems like a great character, but she’s sidelined for most of this book. Dresden’s stepmother makes many appearances and represents another thing that feels like it came out of nowhere. Fortunately, the bulk of the story is reasonably well done. As per usual, the magic stuff tends to get out of hand and Dresden seemingly endures wayy too much physical damage to be effective, but that’s par for the course in this series. In the end, I had a fine time with this, even if it didn’t really knock my socks off.
• The Martian by Andy Weir – You know that scene in Apollo 13 where the NASA team dumps a bunch of parts on the table and tries to make a square filter fit into a round hole, using only the equipment available in the space capsule? Yeah, this book is 350 pages of that, only the astronaut in question is alone and stranded on Mars. And he’s got a lot more resources and equipment available to him. Still, this is a fascinating chronicle of how he survives in the hostile environment of Mars. Author Andy Weir cuts no corners, and painstakingly explains how each little bit works. Even more impressive, he makes all of the science approachable and even exciting. He also manages to insert a fair amount of humor into the proceedings, which helps greatly. This isn’t particularly a great character piece, but the challenges facing the character and the problem solving that goes into resolving issues more than makes up for any deficiencies in that area. There are no villains here, only a harrowing fight for survival. This is ultimately one of the most impressive pieces of Hard SF I’ve read in a long time. Not quite as diamond-hard as Greg Egan, but the accessibility and humor make this a gazillion times more approachable and entertaining (if not quite as mind-blowing). You could perhaps argue that the level of detail goes a little overboard, but it was music to this systems analyst’s ears. If this winds up being eligible for the Hugo awards next year, it will almost certainly garner my vote. Highly recommended for those not scared by science (and really, if you’re scared by science, why are you reading science fiction!?)

And that’s all for now. Stay tuned for the Six Weeks of Halloween, starting next Sunday. Up first, I think, will be what I’m calling The Remade (three 50s classics that have been remade).

When Robert Jordan’s entire Wheel of Time series was nominated for a Best Novel Hugo Award this year, I knew I wouldn’t have time to read all of the books. While you might think that’s due to laziness, it should be noted that the series consists of 14 books, 10,000+ pages, and 4.4+ million words. According to my Goodreads stats, I’m averaging something like 12,000 pages a year, and given the fact that I only had a few months before votes were due, it was basically impossible. Fortunately for me, I didn’t particularly care for the first book in the series, The Eye of the World, so reading the entire series became unnecessary. That being said, the publisher, Tor books, was exceedingly generous in making the entire text available in the voters packet, so I thought I’d give the series another chance before voting. I got about halfway through the second book, The Great Hunt, before I had to cast my votes for the Hugo, and I felt good about my ballot. I finished the book not long after, and I must say, it’s a big improvement over the first book, even as it suffers from many of the same issues.

The story picks up where we left off, with our heroic band of misfits taking refuge in a town, waiting for a bunch of Aes Sedai to consult on the happenings of the first book. Nynaeve and Egwene plan to accompany them to train as Aes Sedai, while the rest plan to return home. Our nominal protagonist, Rand al’Thor, has definitively been identified as “The Dragon Reborn” (basically a “Chosen One” type of situation), and is thus developing some major trust issues. Not long after the arrival of the Aes Sedai, the city is attacked by Darkfriends, and two powerful artifacts are stolen, including the cursed dagger which is magically linked to Mat, so it seems that our three farmboys are headed off with a large search party to retrieve the stolen treasures. Meanwhile, foreign invaders called the Seanchan have begun to encroach on the border, and there are all sorts of other weird happenings throughout the world.

There are a lot of similarities to the first book here. There’s an ancient, powerful artifact that is in danger, there’s a bunch of epic journeys, tangential episodic adventures, hearty stews (of course), our band of heroes is separated, and eventually reunited – you know, high fantasy tropes galore. The difference between this book and the previous is that each element here is better done and more memorable. It’s still bloated and sloppy, but at least there’s some more interesting stuff that’s happening. It helps that we already have a pretty good handle on the cast of characters, despite a few new ones, so little time is wasted rehashing what we already know.

The episodic stuff actually works reasonably well. For example, at one point Rand, Loial, and Thurin (the latter being a new character) are separated from the search party and find themselves in a town called Cairhien, where they play something called “The Great Game”, an intrigue-charged game of politics and maneuver amongst the various factions of the city (I’m guessing the name here is historically based). For various reasons, Rand appears to be a Lord to the city, so he is expected to play. His instinct is to simply ignore various invites and overtures, but it turns out that this is taken to mean that he is even more important than he appears. His inaction is interpreted to be a rather extreme action. And so on.

Nynaeve and Egwene have a couple interesting episodes as well. Their training with the Aes Sedai leads to a lot of additional knowledge about how things work in that weird magical lawyer/mafia hybrid environment. They meet up with Elayne and Min (both characters had bit parts in the first book, and were a welcome addition here), and have a rather disturbing run-in with the Seanchan later in the book (this is one of the more memorable tangents, actually).

There are plenty of other tangents that perhaps don’t work as well as the above examples, but for the most part, the characters are growing. Rand is still a little whiny because he doesn’t want to be the Chosen One (a fair complaint, to be sure), but he is also nowhere near as passive or blank as he was in the first book. He has spent some time training as a swordsman, and his chosen one powers are starting to add up (even if he’s scared that they will eventually make him crazy). Mat is still a bit of a turd, but he’s still cursed, so that’s to be expected. Perrin makes himself useful, further developing his latent talent to talk to wolves. Nynaeve and Egwene are both learning a lot, and having to deal with some interesting problems. Moraine and Lan get some more background and motivation. Many of the side characters are further developed. A handful of new characters seem to have some interesting stuff to do.

All of this would still feel rather unsatisfying, except that Jordan manages to bring everything together for a big climax towards the end of the book that is genuinely involving and even exciting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still bloated and overlong, but there is an actual payoff at the end of this book that is encouraging. When I finished the first book, I wasn’t upset or anything and I had enjoyed myself well enough, but I wasn’t that interested in exploring more of the series. This book does indicate that such a thing might actually be possible, and so I’m thus marginally more inclined to pick up book 3 at some point. None of this would have changed the way I voted for the Hugos, of course, but it’s still encouraging.

From what I understand, the series bogs down for a while in the middle books, but eventually all the pieces are assembled for the final battle, which sounds like it could be an interesting experience. I’m planning on reading a bunch of 2014 books and stories in preparation for next year’s Hugo nomination season, but if I read two books a year… I should be finished sometime around 2020. Er, ok, so maybe not. Still, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility, which is more than I could say after the first book, and you never know. After all, I already have all the books on my Kindle. Ah well, the Wheel turns…

The Hugo Award winners were announced late on Sunday, and since I’ve been following along, I naturally had some thoughts on the winners. Also of interest were the final ballot details, which had some interesting information for statistics wonks… I don’t claim to be an expert in such matters, but I still found many details interesting. So without further ado, here are some assorted thoughts on the results:

• Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie, took the best novel award, surprising no one, as this novel has already swept every other major SF award (including the Nebula, Locus, Clarke, and BSFA awards, among others). While this was not my first choice, I don’t have any real objection to it, it’s got plenty of crunchy ideas worthy of exploration, even if it is a bit short on plot. Also of note, it absolutely stomped the competition, with 1335 first place votes, versus only 658 for The Wheel of Time. Speaking of which, that series of novels, while garnering the second most first place votes, fell to fourth place overall thanks to the Hugos’ use of an Instant Runoff voting system. While many feared a Wheel of Time win, I was not surprised because this sort of voting system discourages love it/hate it nominees, and while the Wheel of Time was indeed popular, it had plenty of haters and conscientious objectors who didn’t think that a 14 book series deserved to be considered as a single nomination (like, uh, me).
• My first place vote for Best Novel, Charles Stross’s Neptune’s Brood came in second place, which is basically what I was expecting. Plus, it turns out that Stross won the Best Novella award with “Equoid”, which I found mildly surprising, since it had a high squick factor (according to Scalzi, the story’s genesis came out of a two word phrase, “unicorn bukkake”, which gives you an idea of what you’re in for with this story). Indeed, looking at the details, it appears to have been a somewhat close race, with Six Gun Snow White (which I had thought was going to win) nipping at Stross’ heels the whole way. I wonder if Stross got the edge because everyone knew he would lose the Novel race, and thus shifted their votes accordingly.
• No huge surprises for the other fiction awards, though it didn’t go exactly as I had predicted either. I was a little surprised that Game of Thrones took Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form (over Doctor Who), though since I voted for it, I’m obviously fine with that.
• So, the Sad Puppy slate. It’s a tough thing to judge, because the way Correia went about his campaign was designed to provoke a backlash, so that he could then go and proclaim that the awards were biased. Which everyone already knew. The Hugos have always been a popularity contest. I guess you could say that Correia demonstrated how crappy politics are when introduced to a situation like this (and make no mistake, most of the people taking a hard line on this were pretty crappy about it, on both sides), but that’s a decidedly Pyrrhic victory. Anywho, all but one of the Sad Puppy nominees basically came in last place, with the only exception being Editor, Long Form, where Toni Weisskopf actually had the most first place votes, but wound up in 4th overall thanks to the voting process. Amusingly and entirely unsurprisingly, Vox Day’s story came in 6th place out of 5 (meaning that he was beaten by No Award). In the end, I hope this doesn’t happen again next year. Correia has proven his point, so while I assume he’ll mention that his Monster Hunter book is eligible next year and encourage his readers to participate, he hopefully won’t do so in a way intended to alienate the normal voting base the way he did this year.
• Speaking of the Sad Puppy slate, there was a lot of speculation when the nominees were announced that those who got these things nominated were blindly voting for the entire slate. Looking at the nomination details, this was pretty clearly not the case. Correia’s novel garnered the most votes, with 184, while Vox Day’s story only captured 69 votes. So there are at least 115 people who didn’t do a straight vote. I suppose it’s possible that there were 69 people who did so, but I also find that unlikely. My assumption, shockingly enough, is that the people who nominated were still actual human beings and only voted for things they read and liked.
• While I was not fond of the way that The Human Division ended, I absolutely loved several of the individual stories, so I was surprised that none of them were even close to being nominated in the short fiction categories. I guess the fact that there were so many of them may have spread out the love to the point where no individual work got enough votes to come close to being nominated. On the other hand, Scalzi’s Mallet of Loving Correction (which I believe is just reprints of select blog posts, in book form) did show up on the Best Related Work category nominations, albeit relatively low on the list…
• In terms of near misses, one of the novels I would have nominated if I had participated in that part of the process was The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes, which fell only 2 votes short of making it onto the ballot, which makes me feel a little bad. On the other hand, Upstream Color just barely made the nomination sheet for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form and was far from being nominated, which makes me sad, but I guess it’s understandable. The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself did not appear at all, which is a bit sad (you should read it anyway, I loved it).

Since I’ve got a supporting membership this year, that means I can nominate and vote in next year’s awards, which means I should probably start reading some 2014 books (so far, I’ve not really read anything worth nominating, but I’m hoping to change that in the next few months). Any recommendations are welcome!

This basically concludes the 2014 Hugo Awards posting. I will probably write up a quick review of the second Wheel of Time book at some point (I liked it better than the first book, but it’s still a bit of a repetitive, bloated, repetitive mess), but otherwise, you should be free of Hugo posts until next year. Stay tuned, lots of other stuff coming, including another patented SLIFR quiz and the quickly approaching Six Weeks of Halloween Horror Movie Marathon…

Just a few thoughts that I’ve not crammed into the multitude of other Hugo Award posts I’ve been making of late.

• For the uninitiated, when you become a member of a given year’s Worldcon, you get access to the Hugo Voter’s Packet, which contains the grand majority of the nominated works. However, it’s an entirely voluntary thing, and the decision generally resides with the publisher, not the author. Indeed, the voter’s packet (in its current form, at least), is a relatively recent thing (about 10 years old?) and was not even an official part of the process for the first few years. The reason I bring all this up is that there are a lot of people who seem to be dinging a given work on their ballot simply because it was not included in the packet. This is especially prevalent in the novel category, where three of the 5 nominees only included an extended excerpt in the packet. These included my top two picks, Neptune’s Brood and Ancillary Justice, so I hope not too many people are doing that. Interestingly, the two most hated works also seem to have the most generous publishers: Baen included all three books in the Grimnoir Chronicles (of which only the third was actually nominated), and Tor included the entire Wheel of Time (that’s 14 books, 11,000+ pages, and 4.4+ million words, mighty generous of them). I even saw one person ding Six Gun Snow White because the packet only included it in PDF format (Which, yeah, is annoying, but really? You’re going to hold that against the work?) For my part, while I definitely took advantage of the packet, I also tried not to base my decisions on what was or was not in the packet. I will admit that some of the more obscure categories were more difficult to track down and probably did play into my eventual rankings, but I wasn’t consciously trying to punish the artists because of the way the voter’s packet works.
• I only ended up deploying the No Award option (and the associated action of leaving a work off the ballot) twice, in both cases because of general philosophical disagreements (one because I don’t think you should be able to nominate 14 books as one work, and the other because it wasn’t Science Fiction or Fantasy, and thus should not be in the discussion for a SF/F award). If I’m reading the rest of the internet right, I’m not nearly vindictive enough, as most folks seem to deploy No Award at the drop of the hat, often just because a story had the impertinence to be part of a sub-genre they don’t like. I get the reason for the award, but I feel like it’s being used way too often.
• I’ve read a lot of things I wouldn’t normally read. I have obviously found value in that, but the end result will change little of my overall reading pattern. Of all the stories I’ve read, the only definite thing I’m going to follow up on is to read more Ted Chiang. I will also probably be more open to Charles Stross than I have in the past (still, I’ve had spotty luck with Stross).
• Things I’m disappointed didn’t get nominated:
  • The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself, by Ian Sales (Novella)
  • Upstream Color (Dramatic Presentation, Long Form)

And I think that just about covers it. In a few weeks, I’ll cover the winners, otherwise, we’ll be returning to the Kaedrin of old. I’m sure you’re all super excited. Try to contain yourself.

We are coming down the homestretch; the voting deadline is July 31st, and I’m pretty much finished going through the categories I’m going to get to, so here’s where things are shaking out:

Best Novel:

1. Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross [My Review]
2. Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie [My Review]
3. Warbound by Larry Correia [My Review]
4. Parasite by Mira Grant [My Review]
5. No Award

Not listed is The Wheel of Time, mostly because it’s simply absurd that so many books could be nominated as one entity. I read The Eye of the World and I’m almost finished with The Great Hunt, but nothing I’ve read indicates that I’d place it higher than any of the above. Incidentally, if only A Memory of Light was nominated, I probably wouldn’t have gone this route (even though the end result would still be needing to read 4 million+ words in order to finish off the story, which is absurd).

Predicted Winner: Ancillary Justice

Best Novella:

1. “The Chaplain’s Legacy” by Brad Torgerson
2. “Equoid” by Charles Stross
3. Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente
4. The Butcher of Khardov by Dan Wells
5. No Award

See My Reviews for more details. Not listed is “Wakulla Springs” by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages, primarily because it is not Science Fiction or Fantasy (if this were a historical fiction award, then that story would certainly be near the top).

Predicted Winner: Six-Gun Snow White

Best Novelette:

1. “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”, by Ted Chiang
2. “The Lady Astronaut of Mars”, by Mary Robinette Kowal
3. “The Exchange Officers”, by Brad Torgersen
4. “The Waiting Stars”, Aliette de Bodard
5. “Opera Vita Aeterna”, Vox Day

See My Reviews for more details. All nominees listed, no need to deploy No Award. I did drop “The Exchange Officers” down a peg since my original reading, mostly because the story here did not really stick with me at all (though it’s still a fine story).

Predicted Winner: “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”

Best Short Story:

1. The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere, by John Chu
2. Selkie Stories Are for Losers, by Sofia Samatar
3. The Ink Readers of Doi Saket, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
4. If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love, by Rachel Swirsky

See My Reviews for more details. All nominees listed, no need to deploy No Award.

Predicted Winner: The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:

1. Gravity
2. Iron Man 3
3. Frozen
4. Pacific Rim
5. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

See my comments for more details. All nominees listed, no need to deploy No Award.

Predicted Winner: Gravity

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:

1. “Game of Thrones” The Rains of Castamere
2. “Doctor Who” The Day of the Doctor
3. “Orphan Black” Variations Under Domestication
4. “Doctor Who” The Name of the Doctor
5. An Adventure in Space and Time
6. The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

See my comments for more details. All nominees listed, no need to deploy No Award.

Predicted Winner: “Doctor Who” The Day of the Doctor

Best Professional Artist:

1. John Harris
2. John Picacio
3. Julie Dillon
4. Galen Dara
5. Fiona Staples
6. Daniel Dos Santos

See my comments for more details. All nominees listed, no need to deploy No Award.

Predicted Winner: No idea!

Best Fan Artist:

1. Sarah Webb
2. Mandie Manzano
3. Spring Schoenhuth
4. Brad W. Foster
5. Steve Stiles

See my comments for more details. All nominees listed, no need to deploy No Award.

Predicted Winner: Sarah Webb

Best Fan Writer:

1. Abigail Nussbaum
2. Mark Oshiro
3. Liz Bourke
4. Kameron Hurley
5. Foz Meadows

See my comments for more details. All nominees listed, no need to deploy No Award.

Predicted Winner: Abigail Nussbaum

And that covers all the categories I’ll be voting for (there are several others that I just won’t get to). All in all, it’s been a fun year. I can’t say as though I discovered anything that really blew me away, but I’m really happy with this whole experience (the annoyance caused by various controversies notwithstanding). Since my supporting membership qualifies me to vote on next year’s awards as well, you can probably expect to see this whole rigmarole again next year. I know, I know, you’re already looking forward to it. In the meantime, we’ll probably have a couple more posts on general stuff about the Hugos, and I am really curious to see how the voting turns out (sometime in mid-August).

There sure are a lot of categories for the Hugo Awards (that’s 17 categories, if I’m counting correctly). My main focus has been on the fiction awards, but I’ve obviously been making my way through a lot of the others. That being said, there are some I just won’t get to, whether that’s because I don’t really care about the category or I just don’t have the time to make my way through it. So don’t expect to see much about these categories:

• Best Editor, Short Form – Honestly, I have no idea how we’re supposed to judge these editors. If I were a writer who had worked directly with all these people, that’d be a different story, but as a reader, I’m just not sure what to make of these two Editor categories. How should I know how good an editor is? As I understand it, a great editor should be invisible to the reader, no?
• Best Editor, Long Form – Ditto!
• Best Related Work – Not a category I’m inherently opposed to or anything, I just won’t have the time to make my way through it (though perhaps someday, I’ll read some of them).
• Best Graphic Story – While I do have a certain fondness for Randall Munroe’s “Time” (XKCD) I don’t think I’ll be bringing myself to read the other nominees (only 3 of which are included in the packet). It’s another timing thing here, not really a comment on the category itself.
• Best Semiprozine – If someone can explain what the hell a semiprozine actually is, I might be more inclined to spend more time figuring this category out. It seems to me that “zines”, even ones that involve paid contributers like these semipro ones, are a pretty outmoded concept. I mean, do these things actually get printed up and distributed in this day and age? As it is, I think I’ll probably give this category a pass.
• Best Fanzine – Again, the concept of a fanzine seems rather outmoded, especially when you consider that the grand majority of the nominees are basically just blogs (the packet shows the content in a more traditional zine-like format, but does that really matter). Since I have actually read a bunch of these, I may end up submitting a ballot here, just because I might have an actual opinion. Still, this category begs some questions. Maybe we should consolidate these zine categories and the fan writer category into something that resembles what people actually do these days.
• Best Fancast – If I have time to get to this category, I will. I’ve tried various SF/F podcasts in the past and have been generally unimpressed, but I’ve only tried one of the nominees, so I might try to check this one out if I have time.
• The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer – Technically not a Hugo award, but it’s facilitated through the same process. I don’t think I’ll have time to get to this, but I will say that I have read (and enjoyed) one of the nominated works (The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu) in the course of my normal reading, which I guess says something.

So I’m basically done with all of my Hugo consumption, and the votes are due in about a week. I am still reading some Wheel of Time stuff, but I’m doubting I’ll finish that in time and I’ve not seen anything that really changes my mind. So only a handful of Hugo posts left. I’ll post my final ballot at some point, as well as some other thoughts on the process in general, and I’ll probably post something once the winners are announced. Otherwise, posting will return to its former glory, what with the link dumps and movie bloviating.

Warbound is the third book in Larry Correia’s Grimnoir Chronicles, and (finally) the one that was nominated for this year’s best novel Hugo. Because I tend to take a completist view of this sort of thing, I read the first two novels in the series, Hard Magic and Spellbound, and generally enjoyed them. Correia has mashed up a number of genres – action, noir, fantasy, even a little steampunk, etc… – and made it work. This is no small feat, and I suspect many attempts at this sort of thing do not work anywhere near as well. And Correia is a telented storyteller as well. There are things set up in the first two books that pay off here, indicating a thoughtful approach. Plus, it’s just fun. This is a quality that I suspect is lost on a lot of people, but not on me! Even though this particular genre mashup is not exactly in my wheelhouse, I appreciated the series as a whole.

So I basically knew what I was in for in this book, and it delivered on all the promises made by the first two installments. As an individual entry in the series, I’d say it’s about on par with the rest of it (perhaps better than the second installment, but only because middle stories in a trilogy tend to be incomplete).

The story picks up right where Spellbound left off. Heavy Jake Sullivan is trying to mobilize a force to face the Pathfinder, a scout for the great Enemy that will devour the world if the Pathfinder is successful. Meanwhile, Faye Vierra is coming to terms with being the spellbound and must seek out help to ensure that she is not corrupted by the power that “curse” has granted her. When Sullivan and Faye find out that the Pathfinder has been more successful than it seemed, the planet is about to be plunged into a great battle against the Enemy. You might even say that Earth was warbound. Heh.

The plot is a bit broken up here, with Faye’s story almost completely isolated from Sullivan’s, and with some prominent characters from the first two books making an appearance, but otherwise sidelined for most of the book. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s another indication of how loose the series has been. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and it’s clearly not as bloated or flabby as something like The Wheel of Time books that I’ve read so far, but I do find myself thinking that these books could stand to be a bit shorter.

As per usual, Sullivan and Faye take the brunt of character work, and they’re both likable protagonists. Toru is also the type of character that grew on me as time went on. As always, there’s a colorful cast of supporting characters, including some new faces (I was a fan of Wells, the alienist – a slightly less creepy version of Hannibal Lecter).

As I mentioned in the previous two reviews, one of my problems with stories about magic is how overpowered the magic becomes as the story progresses. The stakes are continually rising, and because it’s magic, it’s tempting to just keep making the magic more powerful. For the most part, Correia has pulled it off in this series. In part, this is because he set up some very clear rules, and used logical extensions of those rules to find new powers. By the end of this book, things were getting a bit too overpowered, but then, this is also the last book, so I think some leeway is required. I’m pretty impressed that Correia was able to balance everything out this well.

I guess this is a spoiler, but not really – Faye saves the world (as she did in the first two books), but on a larger scale. Faye is basically the main protagonist, and she’s a bit terrifying. This is partly because she is so powerful, but also because she seemingly kills hundreds if not thousands of people throughout the series, but feels not a single pang of guilt towards it. For that matter, Sullivan and the rest of the Grimnoir are similar in that way, so perhaps that’s a Correia thing. But in this book, there is at least an acknowledgement that such wanton bloodlust will lead to disaster. Faye is the spellbound, which means that she can absorb the power of magical actives when they die. This is why she is so powerful. But such power can also corrupt, and the previous spellbound became consumed by his quest for power and became a mindless killing machine (basically driving this alternate history’s version of WWI) Faye spends a good portion of the novel trying to come to terms with the fact that she could easily be corrupted in that way, and she catches herself thinking things that would lead down that path. I was glad to see this tacit acknowledgement that all this death and destruction wasn’t really a desirable thing, even if Correia seems to revel in the violence and action of it all.

And finally, a word on the audiobooks. Even though Baen very thoughtfully included all three novels in the Hugo Voter’s Packet, I listened to the audiobook for all of them. As it turns out, the book is read by Bronson Pinchot. Yes, that Bronson Pinchot. And he’s really fantastic (supposedly, these books have won him awards), seemingly able to handle a multitude of accents and vocal registers (given the worldwide scope of these stories, there are a lot of foreign accents required). From Audible, it seems he has 144 titles available, which is a pretty impressive body of work.

This wraps up all of the fiction awards that I’m voting for. My ballot for best novel is basically as predicted, with this one falling right smack in the middle, behind Neptune’s Brood and Ancillary Justice, but ahead of Parasite (that ending has really curdled in my mind as time goes on) and The Wheel of Time. In the end, I probably wouldn’t have read all three of these books if left to my druthers, but I have had no real issue with them either. They’re a ton of fun, and I may even be tempted to check out some of Correia’s Monster Hunter books if I get in the mood for something like that.

Obligatory note of all the controversy surrounding the nomination of this book. I’ve already (briefly) discussed it elsewhere, but I tended to concentrate more on reading all the nominees. Now that I’ve read all of Correia’s “Sad Puppy” slate of nominees, I’d say it was a pretty mixed bag in terms of quality. Then again, so were a lot of the nominees overall, but that’s just the way of populist awards. I appreciate reading some things outside of my comfort zone, and this was a good way to accomplish that. I get the consternation around this, but I was ultimately pretty happy with this whole experience.

From your perspective, only a few more Hugo posts to go. I am reading The Great Hunt (the second book in the Wheel of Time series), so I’ll probably review that when I finish (short story here is that I like this better than the first book, but it’s still ridiculous that this series got nominated as a whole. I’m reading this book because Tor very thoughtfully included the entire damn thing in the voter’s packet. But according to my kindle, I have about 266 more hours of reading to go before I finish the series, which ain’t going to happen by the end of the month). There are definitely some awards that I won’t be voting for (how am I supposed to vote for Editors?), and I have some other assorted thoughts about the whole process as well. I’ll post my final ballot when I get the chance as well. Then I’ll have to find something else to write about, because I’m sure my readers (all three of you!) are getting pretty sick of this Hugo stuff.